This is going to be a slightly earlier update post than it’s been for a while as I want to get some personal things sorted out tomorrow (Monday) so am doing this whilst I’ve the time. So without further faffing, onto the update…

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It’s been a bit of a weird week as half of my focus has generally been trying to track down and get some of the issues I’ve been logging against the replacement plug-ins fixed.(mainly for the library playlists and podcast plug-in). This is progressing and although I’ve fixed things, the list has grown a bit more than it was to start with but it’s more me being picky and wanting to get things right on these replacements as to some they are critical to how they use Winamp.

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The next thing which came about from some talk on the Winamp Enthusiasts Group is the creation of a basic scheduling feature as a means to replace an old 3rd party plug-in which doesn’t play well with UAC or as part of a portable Winamp install (waggles fist at delphi compiled dlls from 2004 which doesn’t allow my normal dll hooking code to work as took around a day to come to that conclusion off *grumbles* ).

Later on there will be more done to this feature but it’s a basic starting point (please remember that) for what is to hopefully come (as integration with Windows task scheduler is one of the things I’m planning to allow for things to happen if Winamp / WACUP isn’t running at the time).

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Related to the basic scheduler support, I’ve done it at this point as part of the Time Restore & Autoplay plug-in since it’s file / library query options were most of what was needed for the basic scheduler mode (most likely this will be split out into it’s own plug-in when it needs more involved work).

However there was one small(ish) thing that I’ve added which is to allow the normal autoplay action to also directly support loading a library playlist in addition to the existing file / library query loading support. This is something that I really should have done years back but never did for some reason, so it’s now done and might be useful for someone out there.

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The final thing is regarding a beta WACUP release and I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit for the last few weeks. So I’m at the point now where I feel like I really need to get something released as an initial beta. As it’s a few days short of a year since I was let go by ‘the company that shall not be named’ (specifically 15th September) and almost 8 months since I started on coding things for WACUP.

So I’m now trying to do what I can to get a first beta made available by the end of this month (but there might be a few days wiggle room) and it will most likely be a reduced version of what I’ve done so far (as if you’re following then you’ll know that not everything is 100% ready for wide scale usage).

By doing it this way, it allows for something to start being tested (i.e. that the core of WACUP works), shows I have actually got something to provide and that whilst all of that is going on it then allows me to finish off the parts I’m holding back from the initial release to get them working and in-turn tested. This initial beta phase is very likely to last a few months as it depends on what issues arise (as how however much I try to test and expect what could be happening, there’s likely something or some sort of interaction that has been missed) as well as the level of the feedback received (be that the quality off it to the volume of issues that are reported).

I will be posting more details nearer the time on what is required to be included (as I’ve got a list of people who’ve made contact to show interest in helping out on testing) but I’m happy for more to test out.

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So that’s this update of what’s been going on over the last week. Here’s a general summary of what was talked about:

• An initial date has been set for the first closed beta release availability
• Basic scheduler support for timed playback added (to replace a bad 3rd party plug-in)
• Some library playlists + time restore plug-in integration improvements
• Generally working on bug fixes (mainly for playlists and podcast support)

-dro